re-reading – The Endless Bookshelf

commonplace book : march 2025

31 March current reading :

— Winsor McCay. The Complete Little Nemo 1905-1927. / Alexander Braun. Winsor McCay A Life of Imaginative Genius [2014]. Taschen, [2022].

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— Raphael Cormack. Holy Men of the Electromagnetic Age. A Forgotten History of the Occult. W. W. Norton, [2025].

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26 March / homeward bound

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Zocotora insula

Your correspondent will be far away, and farther, and off line for the next couple of weeks, and will report upon re-entry. [Image above, Zocotora insula, detail from Turcicum imperium, in a Blaeu atlas at the Beinecke.]

Looking ahead to April, the Brontë Society and Tartarus Press will be publishing A Book of Ryhmes by Charlotte Brontë, the manuscript book from 1829 now at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, in a fully illustrated edition with an introduction by Patti Smith, a scholarly essay by Barbara Heritage, and an afterword by Henry Wessells. Publication is scheduled for 21 April (birthday of Charlotte Brontë) and further details will be available at http://tartaruspress.com/bronte-a-book-of-ryhmes.html.

Also in April, the New York Antiquarian Book Fair will be held 3-6 April at the Park Avenue Armory. Come say hello (Cummins booth A3).

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recent reading :

— John Crowley. Little, Big [1981]. Harper Perennial paperback.
Just felt like re-reading it, again.
[added note : an old and trusted friend, carried to the end of the world and back ; always something new arises from the experience of reading Little, Big]

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William Morris on the shelves at Chenati

The library of Donald Judd at at La Mansana de Chinati/The Block in Marfa, Texas, has been catalogued in a neat interactive (and searchable) display. When we visited back in May 2015, I remember being struck by the extent of Judd’s holdings of another artist polymath, William Morris ; the detail above shows most of those holdings. [Thanks to CB for the link.]

https://library.juddfoundation.org/#about

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recent reading :

— Walter Abish. 99 : The New Meaning. With photographs by Cecile Abish. Burning Deck, [1990].

The few books I have published, however, won me no fame. I do not complain of this, anymore than I brag of it, for I feel the same distaste for the “popular author” genre as for that of the “neglected poet” (from “What Else”)

— Philip K. Dick. Radio Free Albemuth [1985]. Mariner pbk. [printed 29 Jan. 2025].
/ re-reading, though I have been thinking about “the tyranny of Ferris F. Fremont” for some time, indeed for much of the past decade

— Peter Straub and Anthony Discenza. “Beyond the Veil of Vision : Reinhold von Kreitz and the Das Beben Movement” [in:] Conjunctions 65, 2015.

— Mark D. Tomasko. Wish You Were Here. Guidebooks, Viewbooks, Photobooks, and Maps of New York City, 1807-1940, from the collection of Mark D. Tomasko. Grolier Club, 2025.
Illustrated catalogue for an exhibition on view through 10 May 2025. The Viele Topographical Map (1865) displays all the watercourses and terrain of Manhattan before the city became part of the built environment.

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commonplace book :

“Elfland as implacable as ever, but now ruthlessly enmeshed in contemporary mortal affairs.” — Mark Valentine, at Wormwoodiana

https://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2025/03/henry-wessells-elfland-propositions.html

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books received :

— Michael Swanwick. A Fantasist’s Guide to Venice. Dragonstairs Press, 2025. Edition of 79.
Collection of nine anecdotes about Venice, life and death, and writing, by the author of “The Mask” (collected in Tales of Old Earth).

— Marjan Beijering. Op zoek naar het ongerijmde. Leven en werk van Janwillem van de Wetering (1931-2008). Asoka, [2021].

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‘we are a verb, not a noun’

— Mark Valentine. Fairy Chess [cover title]. 2025. Edition of 100.
Collects five poems written in response to words or phrases in the work of Veronica Forrest-Thompson, with allusions to Wittgenstein, Gauloises, libraries, and bicycles.
— —. Fire Signs. [cover title]. 2025. Edition of 100.
Visual record of found poetry from Sunny Bank Mill, Farsley near Leeds.

Little, Bigs

Four copies of the Incunabula edition of Little, Big by John Crowley, hand bound by an old friend for the author, artist, publisher, and one other. The special binding was commissioned to honor a pledge made long ago, and also as a gesture to mark the many hours of readerly delight that the book has given me (see here, 2001; here, 2007; an entire chapter in my Conversation, 2018; or here, 2021). John Crowley is also a friend of many years, and so it is a pleasure to know that the author’s copy — note the discreet initials at the foot of the spine — had reached him well in advance of today, this his eighty-first birthday.

Happy Birthday and all good wishes to John Crowley !

a pair of Swanwicks

— Michael Swanwick. Red Fox, Blue Moon. [16] pp. Dragonstairs Press, 2023. Edition of 69 copies. Stitched in blue wrappers with a photo on front wrapper.
Another world in miniature from the deft and prolific Mr. Swanwick, a history of the Roxborough neighborhood of Philadelphia, replete with fox lore and subversive whimsy from what archy would call the “under side”.
[Swanwick is a master of the short short story and more than fifty of these have appeared in the ephemeral Dragonstairs books (the tally of fiction is more than 30 titles to date).]

— Michael Swanwick. The Best of Michael Swanwick. Volume Two. 530 pp. Subterranean Press, 2023. Edition of 1,000 copies, signed by the author. Evergreen cloth and pictorial dust jacket by Lee Moyer.
Includes the beautiful and devastating “For I Have Lain Me Down on the Stone of Loneliness and I’ll Not Be Back Again”, the oh-so-tricky homage of “The She-Wolf’s Hidden Grin”, “The Beast of Tara” (“a story idea I came up with in the mid-seventies and finally wrote last year. So if you’re wondering how long it takes to write one of these things and many other fine tales”), and many more. “Libertarian Russia” is filled with a sense of wonder and loss and deep nostalgia and reads like a despatch from another lifetime though it dates from 2010.
[The Best of Michael Swanwick, “predecessor to the current volume” (as the jacket panel notes), was published by Subterranean in 2008 in an edition of 150 signed copies.]

recent reading : february to june 2023

current reading :
— Marcel Proust. Albertine disparue (1925) & Le temps retrouvé (1927). À la recherche du temps perdu IV. Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.

— M. John Harrison. Wish I Was Here. An Anti-Memoir. [Serpent’s Tail, 2023]. Signed by the author 23 May 2023. [Gift of MLV].

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recent reading :

— S. Barkworth. The Nijmegen Proof. Holmes Publishing Co., 1988.

— George Sims. The Terrible Door. The Bodley Head, [1964].
— —. The Last Best Friend [1967]. Carroll & Graf pbk., [1988].
— —. Hunters Point. Gollancz, 1973.
— —. The End of the Web. Gollancz, 1976.
— —. The Keys of Death. Macmillan, [1982].
George Sims (1923-1999) was an antiquarian bookseller, specialist in literature and literary manuscripts, and author of The Rare Book Game (1985), a memoir in the form of essays, and its several sequels. His crime novels are full of the most granular detail of the byways of London in the early 1960s, and Hunters Point is partly set in a San Francisco observed with similar care. Sims was a long-time friend of Julian Symons (I have his Death’s Darkest Face inscribed to Sims), which sparked my interest. H. R. F. Keating included The Last Best Friend in his Crime & Mystery The 100 Best Books and noted that the “exactitude of the poet” and “peripheral elaborations” are “simultaneously his triumph and something like his downfall” and mark him as an amateur writer. Sometimes the digressions are the voyage.

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— Robert Sheckley. The Game of X [1965]. Jonathan Cape, [1966]. Excellent send-up of the espionage genre and a love letter to the city of Venice, with Sheckley’s characteristic wit bubbling up at odd moments and with perfect timing.
— —. Crompton Divided. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, [1978]. Scent and memory and an interplanetary question for personal integration made literal. Expanded from an early novella, “Join Now” or “The Humors”, with a cock-eyed nod to Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”.

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— Julian Symons. The Man Who Killed Himself. The Crime Club, Collins, 1967.
— —. The Man Who Lost His Wife. The Crime Club, Collins, 1970.
— —. The Players and the Game. The Crime Club, Collins, 1972
— —. The Detling Murders. Collins, 1982. The Detling Secret. Viking. 1983.
— —. Something like a Love Affair. Macmillan, 1992.
I have long enjoyed the crime novels of Julian Symons which also serve as examinations of middle-class British life. I had read one or two of these a long time ago, and re-reading them was as interesting as charting new territory.

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Dorothy L. Sayers. Clouds of Witness [1927]. Bourbon Street Books paperback.
— —. Strong Poison [1930]. Bourbon Street Books paperback.
— —. Gaudy Night. Gollancz, [1936].
— —. Busman’s Honeymoon [1937]. Bourbon Street Books paperback.

— James Clarke. Sanderson’s Isle. Serpent’s Tail, [2023].

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— Arthur Machen. Far Off Things. Martin Secker, [1922].
— —. The London Adventure. Martin Secker, [1924].

— Iain Sinclair. Agents of Oblivion. Swan River Press, 2023.
Four short stories on Blackwood, Machen, Ballard, Lovecraft.

— Paul McAuley. Fairyland [1995]. Gollancz SF Masterworks paperback.

— Avram Davidson. AD100. 100 years of Avram Davidson. 100 Unpublished or Uncollected Stories. Volume I [II]. [xii], 635, [9]; [xii], 548, [8] pp. [Or All the Seas With Oysters, 2023].
A monumental collection of tales, for the Avram Davidson centenary!

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— Christopher Fowler. Seventy-Seven Clocks [2005]. Bantam Books pbk., 19th ptg.

— Nicola Upson. Nine Lessons [2017]. Faber pbk., [2021]. Crime story rooted in adolescent privilege, with reference to the ghost stories of M. R. James.

— Mark Valentine. The Peacock Escritoire with At Dusk. Tartarus Press, [2024]

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— Herman Melville. Moby-Dick ; or, The Whale. University of California Press, [1981]. Illustrations by Barry Moser. California edition, reproduced from the Arion Press edition.

— Ling Ma. Bliss Montage. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, [2022]. Winner of the Story Prize.

— Janwillem van de Wetering. The Japanese Corpse [1977]. Soho paperback, [1996].

— Michael Swanwick. Transits of Venus. Dragonstairs, 2023.

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— Lord Dunsany. Lost Tales Volume VI. Illustrations by S. H. Sime. [Foreword by Randall, baron Dunsany]. Pegana Press, 2022 [i.e., 2023].
Finely printed collection of 7 stories, including an unpublished Jorkens yarn! Concluding a decade-long project, the first volume of which was the Endless Bookshelf book of the year in 2012.

— John Crowley. Little, Big or, The Fairies’ Parliament. Art by Peter Milton. Afterword by Harold Bloom. Incunabula, 2021 [i.e., 2022].

— Joanna Russ. The Adventures of Alyx. Timescape | Pocket Books, [August, 1983].

Tales from Gavagan’s Bar. Frontispiece by Tim Kirk

— L. Sprague de Camp & Fletcher Pratt. Tales from Gavagan’s Bar (Expanded Edition). Owlswick, 1978.
“rhymes with ‘pagan’”

— Peter Kafer. Charles Brockden Brown’s Revolution and the Birth of American Gothic. Univ. of Penna Press, [2004, i.e., POD 26 Dec. 2022].

— Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Mexican Gothic. Del Rey [pbk, 7th ptg, 2021].

The Avram Davidson Centenary

Sunday 23 April 2023 is the centenary of the birth of Avram Davidson.

On this occasion, worthy of celebration wherever the readers of this website may find themselves, it is worth looking back at origins. I count myself fortunate to have discovered the work of Avram Davidson, when in late 1992 I first read a battered but intact copy of The Enquiries of Doctor Eszterhazy paperback. I was surprised, again and again. The rambling sentences and digressions impressed me, but most of all it was the way in which Davidson integrated obscure and bizarre knowledge into these stories: knowledge that in anyone else’s hands would be dusty and uninteresting or an info-dump that strangled or squashed the flow of language. Davidson was genuinely learned, as even a single sentence taken at random will reveal. There is a healthy measure of irreverence to temper this erudition, too, so that a reader is never oppressed by the weight of information imparted. I know that I was re-reading the Enquiries in late April or early May 1993, for when I decided to order the two books then in print and called up George Scithers, publisher of the Owlswick Press (and Weird Tales), in King of Prussia*, Penna., he answered my inquiry with the statement, “Avram Davidson died last week.”

portrait of Avram Davidson (1923-1993), American science fiction author and essayist

Over the next several months and years, the quest for other works by Davidson, at first to read them, but soon I began preparing lists in an attempt to understand the range of his work. I corresponded with or met folks in and out of science fiction, many of whom I still count as friends. The rest is history, some of it chronicled in back issues of The Nutmeg Point District Mail newsletter and in the archives of the Avram Davidson website. From small seeds and many friendships, the Avram Davidson Society (largely imaginary but important for all that) has fostered interest in the writings of Avram Davidson.

In recent months, I have been re-reading lots and lots of Avram Davidson with great pleasure, the Eszterhazy stories (a perennial favorite), but also “Lord of Central Park” and El Vilvoy de las Islas (if Naples is the most elegant book I have published with the imprint of the Nutmeg Point District Mail, El Vilvoy is the most important). And then there is The Avram Davidson Treasury (1998), the great triumph of Grania Davis and her efforts in the first wave of posthumous publications. And if the Treasury unaccountably omitted three essential stories, “Lord of Central Park”, “The Dragon Skin Drum”, and El Vilvoy de las Islas, well, all three appeared in collections within the next few years, in The Investigations of Avram Davidson and The Other Nineteenth Century. And Everybody Has Somebody in Heaven gathered together material relating to Avram Davidson as an American Jewish writer; the biographical essay by Eileen Gunn remains the most important survey of Davidson’s life and work. These are solid foundations upon which all else has built.

And now, for the Avram Davidson Centenary year, there will be a century of stories, AD 100. 100 Years of Avram Davidson. 100 Unpublished or Uncollected Stories, a two volume collection assembled by Seth Davis and forthcoming in 2023 from Or All the Seas with Oysters, the publishing arm of the Estate of Avram Davidson. Your correspondent had an early look at the table of contents and it is a fascinating assembly: early writings, some of which I have never seen, and stories published in a variety of periodicals and anthologies — within and without the genres— many of them ephemeral, fleeting, and extinct. Once upon a time, dear reader, it took fantastical amounts of luck and patience and effort and, above all, TIME to trace these stories, simply for the pleasure of reading them. Now, this pleasure will be yours, as you peruse two thick volumes. I look forward to doing so myself.

The preparation of AD100 is a colossal accomplishment and a landmark in the posthumous career of Avram Davidson as significant as publication of The Avram Davidson Treasury in 1998. Here’s to the next twenty-five years!

On the occasion of the Centenary, I acknowledge, in memoriam, a short list friends and correspondents who were instrumental in promoting the legacy of Avram Davidson: Grania Davis, Guy Davenport, Reno W. Odlin, George Scithers, and David G. Hartwell.

* King of Prussia, named for an eighteenth-century crossroads tavern, is the wonderfully named town near where I spent much of my youth. I suspect Avram Davidson took a certain amount of pleasure in the unusual name of the town where his friend and long-time editorial champion George Scithers (1929-2010) lived for many years.

[This essay appeared in slightly different form as part of The Nutmeg Point District Mail, vol. XXI, no. 1, archived at http://avramdavidson.org/nutmeg48.htm.]

The Philosophical Exercises of Janwillem van de Wetering. By Henry Wessells

With A Checklist of Books by Janwillem van de Wetering

Author of a highly acclaimed series of mystery novels, world traveller, former Zen student, and former police officer Janwillem van de Wetering brings an unusual perspective to the detective genre. His novels and stories feature a diverse and richly drawn cast of characters and settings that range from the streets of Amsterdam to the Caribbean and from rural Maine to Japan, South America, and New Guinea. A careful eye for the details of police investigations is joined with a quirky sense of humor and a keen interest in philosophical and spiritual matters.

[ To read the complete review essay, click here : https://endlessbookshelf.net/wetering.html ]

[ This article was first published in slightly different form, as “The Mystery Novels of Janwillem van de Wetering” in the issue of AB Bookman’s Weekly for 7-14 September 1998. This digital version was for a long time posted at the Avram Davidson website. All rights reserved. ]

The Dead of the House by Hannah Green

The Endless Bookshelf is many things, but it is above all a series of notes on reading and thinking about books, as texts and as objects. More than a decade ago, a friend gave me a copy of the paperback reprint of The Dead of the House by Hannah Green, deeming rightly that I would appreciate. I read it with pleasure and gave a copy to friend with an affinity for books and for the wood, and he enjoyed it, too. It was Green’s only novel (technically, in science fiction terms, a fixup composed of several linked stories), all the more remarkable for that, perhaps.

I often thought about the book over the years, and then not long ago I saw an inscribed copy of the original edition, published by Doubleday in 1972, and, as one does, thought about it some more. I began re-reading the book, and then turned up a more interesting copy.

custom dust jacket for The Dead of the House by John Wesley, is it the only one to survive?

— Hannah Green. The Dead of the House. Doubleday, 1972. Inscribed by the author, “For Dieter With my Love Hannah New York, April 1972”. With printed pictorial dust jacket by John Wesley, inscribed on the blank front flap, “Cover for Dieter John Wesley 1972”, and retaining original publisher’s dust jacket with text front panel and author portrait on back panel.

Hannah Green (1927-1996) married painter John Wesley in 1971. His jacket images are closely linked to the text and the look is not dissimilar to his other graphic work at the time (especially some early works, such as Alice or the Radcliffe Tennis team) and a little more somber than the pop art motifs for which he is best known. Was it a trial proof for a design rejected by Doubleday ? And, of course, one wonders about the identity of the Dieter to whom the book is inscribed.* To be continued, perhaps.

[* possibly German artist Dieter Roth, whose work was sometimes exhibited with John Wesley’s at about this time.]

R. H. van Gulik: Diplomat, Orientalist, Novelist

special issue on re-reading : part four
R. H. van Gulik: Diplomat, Orientalist, Novelist

R. H van Gulik, The Chinese Maze Murders, 1956

Every year I re-read a few of the mysteries of Robert van Gulik, always with pleasure, for these tales of Judge Dee evoke an entire world. This is a long-standing interest: in 1997, back in the days of AB Bookman’s Weekly, I wrote a feature essay on the life and publications of this fascinating person, who accomplished many things during a comparatively short life (see below). And of course, the world being a place where “the impossible invariably occurs”, not long after I turned in that article, on a shelf in a bookshop I found a copy of Judge Dee Plays His Lute by Janwillem van de Wetering, and learned that a decade earlier he had written a monograph on van Gulik. This discovery led to meeting van de Wetering (and Dennis McMillan), but those are stories for another day.

In the early days of the Endless Bookshelf, in 2007, I republished the article on van Gulik. Sometime after that I met film-maker Rob Rombout, who returned to New York a couple of years later to film a segment of his marvellous globe-trotting documentary, On the Track of Robert van Gulik. And when I visited Boston a few years back to research in the Gotlieb Archival Research Center at BU, I had a look through some of the papers of van Gulik.

The Judge Dee books are in print from the University of Chicago Press, and are well worth seeking out. Here is the opening passage of the biographical article :

R. H. van Gulik: Diplomat, Orientalist, Novelist

The writings of Dutch diplomat and author Robert Hans van Gulik (1910-1967) reveal his considerable talents as a storyteller as well as the conscientious scholarship and varied interests that characterized his life. His nonfiction works cover a broad range of subjects from Chinese culture, folklore, art, and music, such as Chinese Pictorial Art as Viewed by the Connoisseur, Erotic Colour Prints of the Ming Period, and The Gibbon in China. He is also widely known for his detective fiction, beginning with Dee Goong An : Three Murder Cases Solved by Judge Dee (a translation of a Chinese work), which led him to write a series of seventeen books featuring the Chinese magistrate Judge Dee, from The Chinese Maze Murders to Murder in Canton and the posthumously published Poets and Murder.

Read the full essay in the Endless Bookshelf archives

R. H. van Gulik, The Lacquer Screen, 1962. This copy inscribed to Anthony Boucher

The original edition of The Lacquer Screen, published in Kuala Lumpur in 1962 while van Gulik was posted there. Below, the cover of the 1998 Soho reprint of Janwillem van de Wetering’s Robert van Gulik His Life His Work.

Janwillem van de Wetering, Robert van Gulik His Life His Work, 1998, inscribed by the author

time in the novels of Jon A. Jackson

special issue on re-reading : part three
time in the novels of Jon A. Jackson

Jon A. Jackson
The Die Hard. Random House, [1977]
The Blind Pig. Random House, [1978]
Grootka. Foul Play Press/Countryman Press, [1990]
Hit on the House. Atlantic Monthly, [1993]
Deadman. Atlantic Monthly, [1994]
Dead Folk. Dennis McMillan, 1995
Dead Folks. Atlantic Monthly, [1996]
Go by Go. Dennis McMillan, 1998
Man with an Axe. Atlantic Monthly, [1998]
La Donna Detroit. Atlantic Monthly, [2000]
Badger Games. Atlantic Monthly, [2002]
No Man’s Dog. Atlantic Monthly, [2004]

Readers of the ’shelf will recognize the name of novelist Jon A. Jackson, who wrote eleven novels featuring a Detroit detective known as ‘Fang’ Mulheisen, and Go by Go, a sharp novel of events in Butte, Montana, in 1917. I am pretty sure it was Dennis McMillan who first told me about Jackson, and I was intrigued, for I had read Red Harvest and knew that Hammett’s Poisonville was Butte, and I had spent one summer and one winter in Detroit in 1979, which was right around the time Jackson began publishing the Mulheisen novels. I began picking up the books, and have read and re-read them over the years. I have not revisited Detroit, so I have vivid memories of the sounds and smells and camaraderie of the zinc foundry where I worked that summer, and only a residual memory of the geography. The city is a character — if not quite to to the degree that Innsmouth is a character in Lovecraft’s story — or, more to the point, Detroit is an attitude that is felt throughout the novels. Detective Sergeant Mulheisen is nearing forty, a good detective despite the limitations of budget and pressure. He is smart and disinclined to move off the street into an administrative post. He is not the only recurring character in the Detroit novels: several characters take on lives and energies of their own, and Jackson had the sense to follow where they led him. Grootka, Mulheisen’s some-time mentor and a tough, even brutal cop of the old model, is the focus of the third novel, which ends with his death, but Grootka was so protean a figure that several years later Jackson answered the question What happened to Jimmy Hoffa? in Man with an Axe, a jazzy novel of Grootka’s notebooks and clues conveyed posthumously to Mulheisen. Joe Service, a troubleshooter for the Detroit mob from somewhere out west, and Helen Sedlacek, a mobster’s daughter, enable Jackson to range far afield from the Motor City, sometimes with Mulheisen in pursuit.

Among the notions that have interested me are the sense and function of time in the books. These are not novels of unchanging characters in an almost eternal present (examples being the musical comedies without music of the Wodehouse’s tales of Bertie Wooster, or Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels), nor are they quite the large work in twenty-two novels which is John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series. It’s a funny thing, the internal elapsed time in a work of fiction, even more so when one thinks about a succession of books: which clocks are ticking, those a reader discerns within each book, and those unseen ones in the spaces between books. It is of course a mug’s game to demand too much (any?) internal consistency within a fictional narrative, but the nature of attention is to observe and create patterns. The Mulheisen books describe a fairly tight sequence of murders, heists, and capers — much shorter than the nearly thirty-year timeline of publication — during which Fang contemplates and rejects career changes, the face of the Detroit mob changes, and Joe Service remains a step ahead of the cops (mostly).

While Jackson brings computers into the series early on — the scam in Grootka which leads to murder is a computer program automating a shell game for access to money as information, a kid with a PC delivers critic messages to Mulheisen in Man with an Axe, and mobster Humphrey DiEbola finds his school sweetheart on a bulletin board — the world of Mulheisen and Joe Service is, however, an analogue one, where people walk and and talk and drive and learn things through unmediated experience. Maybe that is one one the charms of the series for me. Mulheisen thinks about the colonial history of the Detroit, and the rumors and legends in the Detroit of his youth, so there is a tacit recognition that narratives of human motivations and actions are meaningful.

The subjective experience of the reader is that all the action from The Die-Hard to La Donna Detroit occurs in just a few years, a reminder of the long continuity of human life before the ubiquity of smart phones. The last two are a little different. Badger Games brings home the aftermath of the Balkan wars into Joe Service’s rural arcadia. No Man’s Dog is definitely post-Patriot Act with elements of domestic terrorism and extralegal activities by disaffected government agents, and a clear sense that Mulheisen is an older cop in a changed world.

No great conclusions to offer, just a suggestion to pick up one of Jackson’s books if you see it. Go by Go, his novel of a raw Pinkerton op named Goodwin Ryder, recreates the wide open atmosphere of Butte in 1917. It is a retrospective narration of some complexity and features a cameo of Sam Hammett.

[Note: the idea of paying attention to internal subjective timelines in works of fiction arose in a conversation with Brendan Byrne about time in Liz Hand’s Cass Neary novels. Perhaps he (or I) will write that essay.]

reading the map of Glasgow

special issue on re-reading : part two
reading the map of Glasgow
Wm. McIlvanney, The Papers of Tony Veitch, dust jacket
— William McIlvanney and Ian Rankin. The Dark Remains. Europa editions, [2021].
— William McIlvanney. Strange Loyalties. William Morrow, [1991].
— William McIlvanney. The Papers of Tony Veitch. Pantheon Books, [1983].
— William McIlvanney. Laidlaw [1977]. Europa editions, [2014].

‘It’s the questions you don’t ask that count. People don’t give answers. They betray them. When they think they’re answering one thing, they’re giving an honest answer to something else.’

Laidlaw (1977) and The Papers of Tony Veitch (1983) were something else when they appeared, and still are. The books stand with the hardest urban noir but with a remarkable difference. Where some of the 1950s classics of the form are nihilist mirrors of a messed-up America, Glasgow detective Jack Laidlaw burns with “that anger against so many things” and McIlvanney’s narratives show life on the under side of things with compassion (a quality for which Laidlaw is mocked by some of his colleagues). McIlvanney is master of the raw, unpleasant simile: the father of a murder victim “was still following the relentless parade of his thoughts, like an Orange March nobody dare cut across”. Laidlaw’s “free-lancing” behavior, “separate from the main investigation” yet bringing matters to a solution, is a cognate of Janwillem van de Watering’s “looking at it from different sides”.
I really enjoyed re-reading The Papers of Tony Veitch, where the intensity jumps the boundaries. “Laidlaw remembered that one of the things he hated most was elitism. We share in everyone else or forego ourselves.” And Chapter 5 is a succinct one-act play, after hours “in ‘The Crib’, a strangely named pub not really suitable for children, where on a good night Behemoth would have been no better than even money.” It starts innocuously enough, “Licensing laws can be fun.”
In Strange Loyalties McIlvanney switched to a first person narration (with all the limitations and strengths of that mode). The novel again probes class structures, memory, and hypocrisies. Laidlaw’s hurtling inquiry into his recently dead brother’s past stirs things up as effectively as Hammett’s Continental Op did in Red Harvest. The hard man in the fancy house walks into the cell door Laidlaw has opened (closing a narrative thread begun in the first book), but the answers Laidlaw finds offer no comfort.
The Dark Remains, just published, was completed by Ian Rankin from a partial manuscript left at McIlvanney’s death. The novel is deftly plotted, set in the earliest days of Laidlaw’s career, but Rankin’s style is less explosive than McIlvanney (“His writing style is more poetic than my own” as Rankin put it in a recent essay). The Dark Remains evokes Glasgow in the 1970s, and the narrative is seeded with allusions to the earlier novels (almost to the point of egging the custard). It is a nice homage to McIlvanney, and a spur to read or re-read the originals, especially The Papers of Tony Veitch.